After ISS fiasco, NASA asks the first deep space telecom to please stand up

NASA is calling for the space and telecommunications industries to pitch them a business model: you design, build, and launch a Mars satellite and we’ll lease time using it as a communications relay. This is an important proposal — or more accurately a call for proposals — because without a solution like this we might lose the ability to exchange data with rovers like Curiosity.

NASA has Mars missions planned to run until at least 2020, but it’s not interested in sending orbiter after orbiter, just to keep the Martian sky filled with an adequate number of broadband routers; it’ll eventually need to redirect funding to more novel experiments. Thus, the only solution is to have somebody else keep sending the orbiters, which NASA would generously pay to use.

But who would pay to do such a thing, and more importantly, how would they recoup expenses? NASA thinks they should have to figure that out for themselves. To be fair, the reward for pitching the right business model would likely mean millions in government contracts, so the space agency can afford to be a bit presumptuous.

MAVEN is the last Mars mission NASA has planned that could act as a communications platform.

It’s actually a bit unclear exactly what they are asking for. In some parts of the official Request For Information (RFI) it seems like NASA is offering to pay for the whole satellite, from construction to launch to operation, which means that its request for a “business model” is really just request for a price. On the other hand, sometimes it seems like the idea is for a private company to find independent ways to monetize a Mars satellite, and that NASA would only pay them a small amount to operate a comms module on an otherwise entirely private robot.

Which they mean — and even they might not know — will dramatically impact which companies could realistically rise to this challenge. If it’s just a build-launch-lease situation, then we’re looking at companies like Lockheed, Boeing, and SpaceX. If NASA is asking for ideas for capitalism on Mars, we could realistically hear ideas from the resource sector, the telecoms industry, pure-science corporations, even a NATO military or two. Here’s the nut of the RFI, because I find the wording interesting:

NASA seeks options for Mars data relay in which NASA would purchase relay services from a commercial service provider to support users at Mars, including landers and rovers and, potentially, aerobots and orbiters. In this model, the commercial provider would own and operate relay orbiter(s), and NASA would contract to purchase services over some period of time… NASA encourages innovative ideas for cost-effective approaches that provide backward-compatible UHF relay services for existing landers, as well as significantly improved performance for future exploration activities.

You’ll note the sort of restrained panic that lies underneath these sentences. NASA’s funding woes — and unlike many government institutions you really can’t say they could make their budget go much further — have resulted in a number of glaring holes in their operational abilities. Just last month, former NASA administrator Michael Griffin said that Russia has the US in a “hostage situation” given the lack of launch capabilities to the International Space Station. As tensions run high and people actually start saying (whispering) the phrase “Cold War” again, there are Americans in space whose lives rely on the fact that Vladimir Putin doesn’t want to deal with the PR fallout of not letting Western astronauts return home.

The Deep Space Network is growing very quickly, but perhaps not quickly enough.

NASA can’t continue to rely on foreign partners. As much as NASA was a tool for building the perception of cooperation between the two rival powers, that interdependence is really a reliance that can be exploited by whichever side invested more heavily in the ability to walk away from the relationship. NASA’s anemic funding, which represents an ever-shrinking portion of overall federal income, has thus been a move with more geopolitical implications than short-sighted politicians ever had any real reason to imagine.

SpaceX has certainly shown NASA that private contractors will continue to be useful partners in the future.

SpaceX and other contractors look like they will be the answer to NASA’s ISS woes, and they’re a relatively cheap solution because they can find all sorts of supplementary sources of income for launch-to-orbit services. Thus, NASA only needs to foot some of the bill for many of their smaller projects, for aspects of most any project. Boy, do they wish that model would work further from home. This seems like an explicit call for suggestions on how to do that. If it works, NASA could get what it wants without an increased budget or reliance on shaky international partners.

Close diplomatic partners like Canada, the UK, and even (to a lesser extent) the EU, will probably still collaborate and rely on one another in space. But don’t expect many more space-deals with Russia, nor any preliminary ones with China. Leave the symbolic work-together gestures for projects which don’t have human lives depending on the whims of international politicians, and multi-ethnic populations.